Ibraaz announces the launch of Platform 008, which will investigate the expanded geographies embedded in the following question:

How do we productively map the historical and contemporary relationships that exist between North Africa, the Middle East and the Global South?

Over the next six months, from November 2014 to April 2015, Ibraaz will invite cultural practitioners to articulate their views on how we might productively locate North Africa and the Middle East within the context of the so-called Global South. Through engagement with these expanded cartographies, the primary aim of this platform is to explore how we can collectively formulate and develop new epistemological frameworks for producing cultural knowledge. Other questions will explore how we can produce transnational networks—within the oft-conflicted channels of globalization—that operate against the exigencies of neoliberal, political, cultural and economic doctrines. What, we will ask, does mapping such networks enable in both the short- and long-term? Could the Global South represent a nascent form of neocolonial and categorical essentialism? Moreover, does the periphery still exist and can we effectively rethink Occidental/Oriental paradigms without reinstating other binary rationales?

Contributors to Platform 008 will include, amongst others: Pio Abad, Mahmoud Abu Hashhash, Rahel Aima, Basma Alsharif, Monira Al Qadiri, Shiva Balaghi, Yogesh Barve, Eric Baudelaire, Neïl Beloufa, Isak Berbic, Beyond Entropy (Stefano Rabolli Pansera), Campus in Camps, Martina Caruso, Youmna Chlala, Grupo Contrafilé, Laura Cugusi, Shezad Dawood, Clare Davies, Hassan Darsi, Kurchi Dasgupta, Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR), Jeannette Ehlers, Embroiderers of Actuality, Anthony Gardner, Farida El Gazzar, Aikaterini Gegisian, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Nida Ghouse, Natasha Ginwala, Ariel Hassan, Nav Haq, Malak Helmy, Maryam Jafri, Amar Kanwar, Romuald Karmakar, Gilles Kepel, Lara Khaldi, Bouchra Khalili, Daria Kirsanova, Taus Makhacheva, Ahmad Makia, Santiago Mostyn, Gerardo Mosquera, Diana Nawi, Uriel Orlow, Rosana Palazyan, Nikos Papastergiadis, Haig Papazian, Fernando Resende, Amanprit Sandhu, Stephen Sheehi, Mounira Al Solh, Jonas Staal, Hakan Topal, Eric Van Hove, Vangelis Vlahos, Leung Chi Wo, and Tirdad Zolghadr. 

A selection of essays from Platform 008 will be published in Volume 04 of our Visual Cultures in North Africa and the Middle East print series. Volume 01, Uncommon Grounds: New Media and Critical Practices in North Africa and the Middle East, was published in September; and Volume 02, Dissonant Archives: Knowledge Production and Contested Narratives in the Middle East, edited by Anthony Downey, will be published in May 2015.

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